Our volunteer, Patrick, and I did a book pickup one day. The donation was so large that it took two trips from Lakewood to the warehouse. We loaded a layer of totes into the back of the truck, stacked another layer on top of them, tied it down, and Patrick took off while I kept packing boxes. It was nearing rush hour.
As Patrick pulled off the highway and turned through the intersection at the off-ramp, one of the book boxes slipped its mooring and went sailing through the air to land on the pavement and shatter into a million plastic shards and pages. The box shattered; the books exploded; paper flew everywhere, in this crowded street full of cars. Patrick tried to rescue the box, but it was too late; the commuters of Cleveland had flattened it in five seconds.
“It felt like watching a kid get hit,” Patrick said, apologizing. “Don’t tell my wife or daughter I said that. But there was no way to stop it.”
I know that feeling. That panic as a book is destroyed, the sadness; like Owl at Home’s “spoons that have fallen down the stove and are never seen again,” the thought of a book being lost is tragic. I sometimes grieve the disappearance of crappy low-budget dime novels from the pulp era; maybe they have no special literary merit or distinction, but someone loved them once. Like a child, every book has a mother.
But. Books themselves, at this cultural moment, are mass-produced consumer goods just like everything else. We aren’t spending decades in the scriptorium inscribing words of sheepskin; these are made in factories. Their value is not in the paper or the fabric, but in the content. We cannot judge books by their covers, any more than people, but each individual copy of a book has little absolute value. The story is what matters and the story is in every copy. If we went around like Bradbury’s human library at the end of Fahrenheit 451, memorizing and reciting books, the books would exist even as their physical bodies were destroyed. The story lives on, as Ursula K Le Guin said, as long as there is one person to tell it and one to hear it.
If you get on Pinterest and look for “book crafts,” you’ll find many ways that people have inventively destroyed and repurposed books. When we receive donations of books that are unsaleable, whether for their condition or their content, I typically re-gift them to local artists to use in upcycling projects. I have thought about making a dress out of pages, but cannot find a place to wear such a thing. So don’t be scandalized, if you see a book being ripped apart and made into something new, or even if you see a book with a tree growing out of it; the body may perish, but the story is immortal. It’s okay.